Finance Budget — Structure and Columns

Short Description A tour of the Finance Budget grid — what each column means and how the structure reflects your organization's spend tracking.

What this article answers

• The key columns on the Finance Budget grid.
• How budgets, lines, and roll-ups relate.
• What the Sys_Gen and Unallocated columns mean.

What Finance Budget is for

Finance Budget tracks the planned, allocated, and actual spend tied to your marketing plan. Where the Plan Grid is about activity (what you're doing), Finance Budget is about money (where it's going).

The Finance Budget grid sits under Menu → Finance Budget.

[SCREENSHOT NEEDED — Finance Budget grid overview]

The columns

The Finance Budget grid typically includes:

• Name — the budget or budget line name.
• Budget — the top-level allocated amount.
• Forecast — projected spend (manually entered or rolled up).
• Planned — sum of Planned Costs from linked Tactics / Line Items.
• Actual — sum of Actual Cost transactions.
• Line Items — count or summary of linked Line Items.
• Owner — the budget owner.
• Unallocated — the difference between Budget and the sum of allocated lines.

Your instance may surface additional columns based on configuration (custom attributes, currency, fiscal period).

Budget hierarchy

Finance Budgets are themselves hierarchical:

• A top-level Budget can contain multiple Budget Lines.
• Each Budget Line can have its own sub-lines, depending on how your finance team structures things.
• Line Items on Tactics link to specific Budget Lines (when that's required by configuration).

Roll-ups work the same way as the Plan hierarchy: child amounts sum to parent totals.

How budget consumption is tracked

A Budget Line's total consumption equals the sum of:

• Planned Costs of all linked Tactic Line Items in Approved state.
• Actuals from transactions (invoices, PRs, accruals).

The Unallocated column shows what's still available — the gap between the Budget value and what's been committed.

What the Sys_Gen columns mean

You'll see Sys_Gen columns (e.g., Sys_Gen_Balance) that are auto-calculated by Hive9. The most common is:

• Sys_Gen_Balance — the planned-vs-allocated difference. If your instance has Prevent negative Sys_Gen_Balance enabled, Hive9 blocks edits that would push the sum of Line Items above the parent Tactic's Planned Cost.

Finance Budget Levels

Your admin can configure Finance Budget Levels (Admin → Org Setup → Finance Budget Levels) that control how budgets are grouped for dashboard display. Common patterns are by department, region, or fiscal period.

Common questions

Why is my Forecast different from my Planned? Forecast is what your team expects to spend (manually entered or rolled up via formulas). Planned is the sum of approved Line Item planned costs. They can diverge intentionally — Forecast is your finance team's view; Planned is the activity-side view.

My budget shows Unallocated but I expected zero — what happened? The Unallocated value reflects funds that haven't been tied to a specific Tactic Line Item yet. If you've added Line Items but linked them to the wrong Budget Line, the Unallocated on the intended line stays high. Audit the Line Items in the Audit Log.

Can I edit Actuals directly? Actuals are typically computed from transactions (invoices, PR consumption, accruals). Direct edits are rare; usually you correct an Actual by editing the underlying transaction.

Related articles

• How do Line Items work?
• Finance Budget — hard limits and automatic distribution
• Finance Budget — transactions
• Plan Budget vs Finance Budget — which one am I looking at?
• The Finance Budget screen is loading very slowly